Principal Data Engineer

$164,500 - $220,600/Yr

Disney - Santa Monica, CA

Full-time - Senior

Santa Monica, CA

Motion Picture and Sound Recording Industries

About the position

The Principal Software Engineer at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology will play a crucial role in developing high-performance data platforms that support Disney's media, advertising, and distribution businesses. This position involves building and maintaining the Audience Manager Platform (AMP), which serves as a centralized data platform capturing and processing consumer behavior across various channels. The role requires effective communication, collaboration, and a strong foundation in programming and computer science to deliver scalable and maintainable software solutions.

Responsibilities

• Work with a distributed team of engineers across multiple products building software collaboratively.
• Work cross-team to build consensus on approach for delivering projects.
• Collaborate with business partners to understand and refine requirements.
• Eliminate ambiguity in projects and communicate direction to engineers to help team members work in parallel.
• Ramp up quickly on existing software to deliver incremental, integrated solutions in a complex environment.
• Build high-performance, stable, scalable systems to be deployed in an enterprise setting.
• Lead high-level architecture discussions and planning sessions.
• Participate in the code review process by assessing pull requests.
• Support systems and services during production incidents as part of the on-call rotation.
• Author and recommend technical proposals and root cause analyses.
• Provide mentoring and advice for other specialists.
• Establish engineering practices and standards within the team to drive quality and excellence.
• Represent the DEET technical community at presentations, tech talks, and other knowledge-sharing efforts.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems, Software, Electrical or Electronics Engineering, or comparable field of study, and/or equivalent work experience.
• Minimum of 10 years of related big data engineering experience modeling and developing large data pipelines and platforms.
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems such as Spark, Hadoop (HDFS, Hive, Presto, PySpark) to query and process data.
• Expert in Python and SQL skills processing big datasets.
• A strong grasp of computer science fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, databases, etc.).
• Experience with at least one major MPP or cloud database technology (Snowflake, Redshift, Big Query, Databricks).
• Expert in Data Modeling techniques and Data Warehousing standard methodologies and practices.
• In-depth experience with Cloud technologies like AWS (S3, ECS, EMR, EC2, Lambda, etc.).
• Solid experience with data integration toolsets (i.e Airflow), CI/CD.
• Experience using source control systems and CI/CD pipelines.

Nice-to-haves

• Proficient with Scrum and Agile methodologies.
• Experience directly managing and mentoring a team.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Financial benefits
• Bonus and/or long-term incentive units
• Flexible work environment
• Professional development opportunities